I had the pleasure of guest lecturing a few weeks ago in the CFB/PHY 3333 course (despite being on teaching leave this semester – Profs. Scalise and Cotton are mighty persuasive). Here is the lecture audio, if you’re interested:
Lecture Audio – Homeopathy (Spring, 2013)
We’ve added a new feature to the part where we make our own homeopathic dilution – I drink my own pee . . . for SCIENCE! (and education)
Wah wah – image from Wikipedia (2)
It is rare that life presents an opportunity to look back at old posts and say, “I told you so.” Back when Tim Tebow was a household name and “Tebow-mania” gripped the sporting nation, I took a look at his statistics, including how he measured against the great quarterback in whose ranks he was being placed, and as a measure of the success of the Denver Broncos, for whom he played at the time. The stats don’t lie. Mr. Tebow was terrible. He was drama but no substance. People remembered the hits – stunning passes that seemed to complete magically, touchdowns followed by an egotistical public display of his faith – and forgot the misses (e.g. the Broncos’s 50% lose rate that same season, or the passes he didn’t complete – his passing stats did not measure up to the greats, even in their first seasons).
Today, the sports news world is alive with the fact that the NY Jets have dropped Tebow. The most critical reports of Mr. Tebow have referred to him as the “worst mistake” ever made by the Jets [1]. It’s been a bad day for Mr. Tebow. But, the reality is that the numbers don’t lie. It wasn’t about how he was used or how he was played. When he played, he was pretty bad. And he was certainly no Joe Montana.
As my colleague Prof. Scalise likes to say, it’s stupid – and a little bit funny – when pseudoscience peddlers and scam artists try to use their nonsense on people that teach a class in fighting pseudoscience and scams. I got my first one today, in Twitter (of all places). A local chiropractor in Richardson, TX sent me a tweet today:
@drsekula drsekula Do you feel like you were ran over by a truck? Chiropractic care is your medication alternative!
To which I responded:
If I felt like I were run over by a truck, a real medical issue, I would go and see a real medical doctor.
#FightPseudoscience
Here is a screen cap of the original tweet and the response. I really don’t expect them to say anything useful back; they will, in all probability, simply move on and find a sucker. I don’t expect them to respond; but, then, they probably didn’t expect me to respond either. So fair is fair.
Tweet spam!
Surprise! I call it “birthday cake,” but it’s just a cheap candle shoved in a Twinkie. Like this combo, a recent article published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine has all the trappings of science, without all the burden of the effort needed to actually achieve good science. Photo from [2].
The abstract for the study is available online [1]. The study is presumably available if your institution has a subscription to this journal.
The abstract alone is sufficient to understand just how bad a piece of research this is Quoting from the authors, “This was an observational, prospective, open, nonrandomized, noncomparative, multicenter study.”
In addition, the authors state, “Physicians were given complete freedom in terms of treatment prescription; thus, prescriptions were individualized for each patient.”
This is a great example of (1) bad science being (2) published in a journal (albeit a very poor one) which will (3) then lead adherents of homeopathy to point and say, “See?! It’s published, just like real science!”
This publication is to real science what shoving a lit match into a twinkie and handing it to your friend is to baking your friend a birthday cake.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=danno%20homeopathy. Danno K, Colas A, Masson JL, Bordet MF. “Homeopathic Treatment of Migraine in Children: Results of a Prospective, Multicenter, Observational Study.” J Altern Complement Med. 2012 Sep 14.
[2] http://immodestproposals.blogspot.com/2009/06/your-daily-photo-burn-one-down-edition.html
